Why
avoid plagiarism? It is illegal. It
is also self-defeating from an educational and learning point of view. The
reason professors ask students to write summaries, oral presentations, lab
reports, literature reviews, essays, term papers and opinion pieces is not to
have students regurgitate or even paraphrase someone else’s words. It is to
require the students to collect information from one or more sources and to
process and synthesize that information into their own expression of its
significance. Students have to make decisions as to what to include, what to
leave out and how best to utilize the information for their own purposes,
meaning the purposes of the assignment they have been asked to complete. The
more students are able to use the information that they collect from other
people to develop their own summary or synthesis, answer their own question,
illustrate their own point, advance their own idea, support their own argument,
or express their own point of view or perspective, the better.

What
is plagiarism?Plagiarism means presenting another
person’s words, writing, ideas or results as your own, whether intentional or
not. The information can be taken from any source – book, magazine, internet, speech, radio or TV show, etc. – and it can
be presented on paper, on a screen or by voice – it does not matter.
Plagiarism also includes efforts to edit other people’s writing to “make it
your own”, e.g. cutting and pasting sentence fragments together, replacing
words using a thesaurus, deleting phrases from a sentence, changing the
sentence structure, etc..

To
avoid plagiarism in writing, one must
paraphrase all information collected from other sources, cite the sources in
the text, and reference the sources in the bibliography.

Paraphrase means to restate a text, passage or work in your own words.

Cite means to list the author and year of the source
in parentheses at the end of each sentence of paraphrased material.

Reference means to list the author, year, title,
journal, publisher, etc. of the source in a bibliography using a format that is
accepted by the discipline of academia that one pursues.

Students should also avoid using direct quotations. Unless one wants to convey the eloquence or pre-eminence
of the original author (e.g., someone of Darwin or Newton’s status, or a Nobel
prize winner), there is no need to use direct quotations in science
communication and their use, even if properly cited and referenced, will be
penalized by graders as a short-cut to paraphrasing. Why should one get credit
for simply inserting other peoples’ words into one’s writing assignment?

What are the consequences of being caught
plagiarizing?

The professor will request a
meeting with the student to discuss the evidence for the plagiarism and to
settle upon a mutually acceptable penalty. Generally speaking, this would be a
failing grade on the assignment in question and possibly an additional punitive
penalty depending on the severity of the plagiarism and the warnings given. If
this cannot be agreed upon, the professor will hand the case over to the Honors
Code Violation panel, which will conduct an investigation and hold a hearing.